SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING MATCHES OF QUERY PATTERNS TO DOCUMENT TEXT IN A DOCUMENT TEXTBASE

A text pattern matching system locates documents whose text patterns satisfy selected criteria as set forth in a query. The system represents text as a series of symbols, each representing a word, number, or other searchable feature. A query also comprises a series of symbols, which also represent a word, number or other searchable feature. In one embodiment, the symbols of the documents and queries are represented by text tokens and query tokens, respectively. The system initially performs a sort to order all tokens according to symbol, and generates a match token for each text token that has the same symbol as a query token. The system then sorts the match tokens to order them according to query and query-symbol order, and then searches through the match tokens to identify series associated with documents, for which the match tokens were generated, which identify series of symbols which satisfy the search criteria.